An Application of Analytic Hierarchy Process and Entropy Weight Method in Food Cold Chain Risk Evaluation Model

Abstract

The food cold chain is a special type of cold chain that refers to a system in which refrigerated and frozen food is always kept in the specified low-temperature environment in all links from production, storage, transportation, sales, distribution to consumption, so as to ensure food quality and to prevent food deterioration caused by temperature fluctuation. In recent years, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has brought a great impact on people’s life and the social economy and also threatened the large-scale food cold chain. Through the effective identification and evaluation of high-risk factors in the food cold chain, this article has found the major risks that have a great impact on the entire food cold chain and proposes the specific measures of risk management and control to solve the problems of food cold chain and reduce risks quickly and efficiently to ensure the stability and safety of food cold chain and avoid the serious food safety accidents. The contribution of this article is reflected in three aspects, namely, (1) applies the expert system based on professional knowledge and rich experience and constructs a classification and identification system structure of food cold chain risk indexes, which lay a foundation for further identifying and evaluating the major risks of the food cold chain; (2) designs a comprehensive index weighting method combining the AHP method and entropy weight method to quantitatively evaluate the major risks. This comprehensive method combines a hierarchical structure system, evaluation algorithm, subjective factor correction algorithm, and so on. The evaluation results are more accurate, have a high matching degree with reality, and have good theoretical and practical significance; (3) analyzes and explains the major risks of the food cold chain in the non-epidemic situations and COVID-19 situations. Proposals and measures for risk management and control are put forward, which have wide practical significance.